Baroness Lawrence insists nothing will change until police accept they are ... trends now

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Scotland Yard is still ‘rotten to the core’ 30 years after Stephen Lawrence’s murder and nothing will change until police accept they are institutionally racist, his mother said yesterday.

Baroness Lawrence, whose 18-year-old son was killed by racist white thugs in 1993, warned ‘this is the last chance for the Metropolitan Police to get it right’, after an independent report found it is institutionally racist, misogynist and homophobic.

Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley came under pressure yesterday to fully accept the verdict as victims’ families, campaigners and MPs said reform was ‘doomed to failure’ if the Met did not acknowledge the scale of the problem in what was dubbed a ‘rats’ nest’.

Britain’s most senior police officer said he could not guarantee there were not more predatory officers, such as Sarah Everard’s killer Wayne Couzens or serial rapist David Carrick, still in the ranks. He rejected any label of institutional wrongdoing as ‘politicised’.

Rishi Sunak yesterday refused to say whether his daughters Krishna, 11, and Anoushka, nine, could trust the police.